With this release we start to upload some content by writers from the Dutch Caribbean. Here featured are Herbert Booi from Bonaire and Willem Eligio Kroon from Curaçao; the latter is one of the earliest Papiamento writers. Papiamento (or Papiamentu) is the official and most widely spoken language on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao (the so-called ABC islands). Papiamento is also spoken on the island of Sint Eustatius. Papiamento is a creole language derived from either Portuguese or Spanish with vocabulary influences from African languages, English, Dutch, and Arawak native languages.

Also here is Edgar Mittleholzer’s Corentyne Thunder, a classic work of West Indian fiction, first published in 1941, that is “more than a pioneering and acute portrayal of the rural Indo-Guyanese world; it is a work of literary ambition that creates a symphonic relationship between its characters and the vast openness of the Corentyne coast.” Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana in 1909. He wrote more than twenty novels. He eventually settled in England, where he lived until his death in 1965, a suicide predicted in several of his novels.